Comment by simoncion
6 days ago
I'm not quoting anyone. Perhaps wrapping the second paragraph in what I understand to be Russian-style quotes (« ») would have been clearer? Or maybe prepending the words "Your argument ends up being something like " to the second paragraph would have been far clearer? shrug
On HN, the convention is that quotations indicate literal quotation. It's not a reasonable paraphrase of my argument either, but you know that.
> It's not a reasonable paraphrase of my argument either, but you know that.
To quote from your essay:
"But if you’re a software developer playing this card? Cut me a little slack as I ask you to shove this concern up your ass. No profession has demonstrated more contempt for intellectual property.
The median dev thinks Star Wars and Daft Punk are a public commons. The great cultural project of developers has been opposing any protection that might inconvenience a monetizable media-sharing site. When they fail at policy, they route around it with coercion. They stand up global-scale piracy networks and sneer at anybody who so much as tries to preserve a new-release window for a TV show."
Man, you might not see the resemblance now, but if you return to it in three to six months, I bet you will.
Also, I was a professional musician in a former life. Given the content of your essay, you might be surprised to know how very, very fast and loose musicians as a class play with copyright laws. In my personal experience, the typical musician paid for approximately zero of the audio recordings in their possession. I'd be surprised if things weren't similar for the typical practitioner of the visual arts.
I agree this is a bad "collective punishment" argument from him, even if I think he's somewhat right in spirit because I as a software dev don't care in the slightest about LLMs training on code, text, videos, or images and fully believe it's equivalent to humans perceiving and learning from the output of others and I know many or most software devs agree on that point while most artists don't.
I think artists are very cavalier about IP, on average. Many draw characters from franchises that do not allow such drawing, and often directly profit by selling those images. Do I think that's bad? No. (Unless it's copying the original drawing plagiaristically.) Is it odd that most of the people who profit in this way consider generative AI unethical copyright infringement? I think so.
I think hypocrisy on the issue is annoying. Either you think it's cool for LLMs to learn from code and text and images and videos or you don't think any of it is fine. tptacek should bite one bullet or the other.
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I come from a family musicians (I'm the only non-musician in it).
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The second paragraph in OP's comment is absolutely a reasonable paraphrase of your argument. I read your version many times over to try to find the substance and... that is the substance. If you didn't mean it to be then that section needed to be heavily edited.